Social media such as microblogging services andsocial networking sites are changing the way people interact online and searchfor information and opinions. This book investigates linguistic patterns in electronic discourse, looking at online evaluative language, Internet slang, memes and ambientaffiliation using a large Twitter corpus (over 100 million tweets) alongsidespecialized case studies. The author argues that we are currently witnessing a cultural movement fromonline conversation to what can be termed 'searchable talk' - online talk wherepeople affiliate by making their discourse findable.